Increasing diversity in the workplace is an important issue for employers across GCC countries. Gender has been talked about a lot recently, but diversity also incorporates hiring employees of different racial and religious backgrounds, nationalities, a variety of ages, physical disabilities and statuses.

Saudi Arabia has over 9 million expats, highlighting the need to embrace a diverse workplace but to ensure that people with different cultures, beliefs and skills can ultimately work together to effectively achieve your company’s business results. Recruiting, managing and retaining a diverse workplace is a key issue facing today’s executives and HR professionals.

The market drivers in Saudi Arabia and across the Middle East include: the global economy; advancements in technology; increased interaction among people from diverse ethnicities, cultures, and backgrounds; all which have caused major demographic shifts in the population. In the GCC countries, on the surface it appears that different cultures are working together well, however there are still some complexities.

A study by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) shows that 85 per cent of leading organisations view gender diversity as a top priority yet only one in five companies have targeted recruiting strategies for female talent. The study highlighted the major institutional and personal barriers preventing women from achieving leadership positions, the best-practice examples, and presents a systematic approach to promoting women in management.

However, only 35 per cent of the companies’ involved included diversity in their managers’ key performance indicators and only one in five offered managers financial incentives for achieving diversity targets. In countries like Saudi Arabia, basic measures like women’s networks, mentorship programmes, or diversity training for managers are not available. Even with the recent advancements in diversity recruiting and hiring practices, HR professionals still have some challenges to overcome before the maximum value of diversity recruiting can be realized.

How an organization approaches diversity recruitment and how it positions itself to target communities will play an important role in the success of its diversity recruiting. Online job seekers use available information to judge whether an organization is committed to building workforce diversity and then make their job acceptance decisions accordingly. Monster.com has eight points to consider to ensure you are attracting the right diverse employees to drive your business:

• Diversity staffing must take careful aim at business goals. Successful diversity recruiting initiatives are tied to the business objectives of the company
• The recruiting process must be efficiently planned, effectively implemented, managed, and measured
• All obstacles must be eliminated at the beginning of the recruiting process
• Establish and strengthen cultural competency and multicultural respect. Cultural competency means the ability and skills to work with diverse people and to manage this process
• Diversity candidates talk to each other; they help each other. They share what it is like to work for the company, or, to interview with the company. How diversity candidates perceive you spreads throughout the community
• Your criteria for interviewing and hiring should be based on qualifications
• Include diversity as part of your mission statement and display it on your website and marketing material.
• Ask yourself: Does your workforce resemble the communities that you operate in? Do they match the demographic that you serve or want to serve? If not, develop a hiring strategy to increase workforce diversity.

In order to fully leverage the power of the internet, organizations need to advertise job openings in the places that both active and passive job seekers are looking. Monster has found that the internet has become and continues to be the place where diverse job seekers and employers connect, and some resources are clearly more attractive to online job seekers than others.

This article was first published on Talent and Diversity Leadership Forum